4 Strategies to Strengthen Dealer Relationships

As a company, you have many options for getting products to consumers. You can sell online, through brick-and-mortar shops or through big-box retailers. Another option used by many companies is a dealer network to do the selling for them.

Many companies rely on dealer networks to be the local face and experts for their brand. Dealers provide that personal relationship that builds loyal customers and, ultimately, increases your sales.

In short, dealers are incredibly important to your success to grow wholesale and yes, even online sales. But they haven’t always been treated that way. Dealers have long cited a lack of communication and support from their vendors often feeling used when its convenient they buy product rather than being considered a partner in your joint success.

If you want your dealers to sell your products and become loyal advocates for your brand, you must help them be successful. You must provide them with mutually beneficial tools and resources that help them become stronger business people, more knowledgeable brand experts to position them to become better sellers.

These tools five tools can help brands strengthen their dealer relationships:

Online to Offline Commerce

Online sales create channel conflict as traditionally eCommerce by-passes the accounts you aim to partner with often disrupting relationships your team has worked hard to build. But a new form of Online to Offline Commerce that integrates dealers into the checkout with either store pickup or local dealer delivery can help you and your retailers meet your business goals. For your brand it helps convert online consumers and give conversion data to marketing teams to optimize their marketing spend while for retailers helps drive new traffic and sales to their stores to turnover their inventory creating a win-win-win scenario for you, your dealers, and the consumer. Now when you invest in your digital marketing, your dealers benefit too.

Self Serve B2B Commerce

Dealers can’t carry everything, but do give a great representative sample to offline consumers browsing to authenticate and confirm which product or brand they may want to buy. Often this leads to retailers showrooming, the art of demonstrating product offline and placing B2B orders online in store. To give sales people confidence in your brand, make sure they can see inventory availability so they can pitch product without fear of long consumer wait times subject to cancellations and lost sales with a B2B Commerce platform.

Market Insights

Help your dealers determine what their next best seller could be with market insights. Helping dealers decide which products they should showroom or carry in their store can make your products shine on the showroom floor and help you get your next purchase order quicker. With digital data generated from online transactions you can quickly determine top sellers in market to help your dealer resonate with more consumers in their trade area demonstrating your commitment as a partner with shared business goals.

Digitally Enable Sales Reps

The Sales Rep and Dealer relationship is a special bond that sometimes is stronger than the brand itself. To grab dealers attention it takes tremendous human effort including face to face where the sales rep acts as a consultant in helping the account make the right decisions for their store or market. Digitally enabling your sales reps with access to timely data they need can make or break their interaction with their accounts. Arming sales reps with the right tools to influence dealers in person is important for closing more business and making showroom floor space gains to get discovered and bought by more consumers.

Dealers are the face of your company and can be one of your strongest marketing tools. They will be most successful when they feel informed and valued by your company. Your marketing team can improve and strengthen the relationship with your dealer network by better understanding their needs and challenges, regularly communicating with them and creating useful business tools to jointly convert more consumers together.

Investing in your dealer marketing and tools for your dealers is not only a smart decision, but it’s also the only decision if your company wants to remain competitive in today’s changing world. After all, they could sell anyone’s product including overseas private labels. Give them a better reason to sell your product and make it impossible for them to walk away from a valued partner in their success.